A dazzling debut novel about a child whose literal enlightenment sets the stage for an exuberant tragicomedy of marriage, religion, and parenthood.
On an otherwise ordinary fall day on a university campus in Chicago, the toddler son of an ambitious divinity-school professor mysteriously starts to glow. The nimbus, as the strange, soft light comes to be known, offers no clues to its origin and frustrates every attempt at rational explanation. Though it appears only intermittently, and not to everyone, the otherworldly glow quickly upends the lives of all those who encounter it.
At once a rollicking intellectual satire, a searing portrait of a family in crisis, and a thrilling metaphysical page-turner, The Nimbus offers a comic and profound examination of the persistence of spiritual belief in a secular age and humanity’s timeless search for meaning.
The Nimbus will be published by Holt on June 10. Preorder a copy at your local bookstore or any of these fine retailers and I'll send you a signed and personalized custom-designed bookplate to stick in the novel when it arrives (click here for more info):
The Nimbus is a hilarious and powerful portrait of faith (or perhaps more accurately the crisis of faith) in a secular and lost age…. Both big hearted and boundless in its spiritual examination.
Baird's debut carefully considers the role of faith in a world largely devoid of it…. Intriguing, entertaining, and often searing in its critiques of academia, this is also a fascinating portrait of a family pulled apart by ambition and unexpected events.
A caustic send-up of the campus novel…. Baird's satire takes no prisoners.… This packs a stinging punch.
Baird is brilliant, and so is his remarkable novel about faith, family, and the life of the mind. Read this wonderful book. You’ll be glad to own it.
I think that there are miracles in the world, but realistic novels don’t usually tackle them. Baird’s intelligence, compassion and humor illuminate this astonishingly original debut, which somehow manages to ask hard questions about how to live while also being enormously fun to read.
A big-hearted novel about the biggest questions—marriage, religion, parenthood, meaning. The Nimbus is comic and profound, a novel that practically glows. Robert P. Baird is a huge talent.
I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed getting lost in the pages of a novel this much. Set in an academic milieu that is captured with delicious precision, and populated with intricately drawn characters as intelligent and compelling as they are believable, The Nimbus is as humane and psychologically astute as it is entertaining—the kind of novel that reminds you why you read fiction in the first place.
Robert P. Baird has written a novel of remarkable breadth, one that ponders both the big mysteries (God, miracles) and the small ones (petty graduate school advisers). The Nimbus is a revelation, a book that explores our deep longing for something extraordinary in an otherwise ordinary world.
